QandO

September 17, 2004

The Persistant Myth of the Stolen Election
Posted by McQ

Its an article of faith on the left that George Bush "stole" the 2000 election with the aid of the Supreme Court which gave him a win in FL that he didn't earn and thus a Presidency he didn't earn.

To this day, the myth is still perpertrated by the likes of Jesse Jackson, John Edwards and John Kerry:

There are many issues to debate and argue about the sordid Florida experience, but one of the most intriguing is how a cottage industry has sprung up among liberals to perpetuate this myth. (Jesse Jackson still refers to Florida as "the scene of the crime" where "we were disenfranchised. Our birthright stolen.") As the 2004 election grew closer, the distortions spread beyond Moore's fantasy to the presidential campaign itself. Senator John Kerry told crowds that "we know thousands of people were denied the right to vote." His running mate, former trial lawyer John Edwards, ended speeches with a closing argument about "an incredible miscarriage of justice" in Florida.

The problem for the left is that there are no facts to support the myth. Unlike Michael Moore's claim in his factually challenged film "Fahrenheit 911", none of the recounts which were conducted post election showed that Al Gore would have won:

But in fact, every single recount of the votes in Florida determined that George W. Bush had won the state's twenty-five electoral votes and therefore the presidency. This includes a manual recount of votes in largely Democratic counties by a consortium of news organizations, among them the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. As the New York Times reported on November 21, 2001, "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward." The USA Today recount team concluded: "Who would have won if Al Gore had gotten manual counts he requested in four counties? Answer: George W. Bush."

Despite evidence to the contrary in the form of that presented by the consortium of news organizations, the myth persists among the left. It is the origin of the hate which they feel for Gerorge Bush.

When confronted by the fact that the news consortium could find no basis for the claim that Bush and the Supreme Court had "stolen" the election, many on the left then made the claim that certain minorities had been illegally "disenfranchised" (by not counting their vote) and others had not been allowed to vote ... in fact, per the claim, prevented by police from voting. Enough, those critics claim, to have easily made the difference for Al Gore.

After all the media recounts of 2001 showed that George W. Bush would still have won under any fair standard, Democratic activists have narrowed their charges to the purported disfranchisement of black voters. The Civil Rights Commission, led by Democrat Mary Frances Berry-with only two Republican commissioners at the time-issued a scathing majority report in 2001 alleging "widespread voter disenfranchisement" and accusing Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush of "failing to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."

So by what means did the Civil Rights Commission prove these charges? Well, in fact, they really never did.

But when it comes to actual evidence of racial bias, the report draws inferences that are not supported by any data and ignores facts that challenge its conclusions. Since we have a secret ballot in America, we do not know the race of the 180,000 voters (2.9 percent of the total number of ballots cast in Florida) whose ballots had no valid vote for president. Machine error cannot be the cause of discrimination, since the machine doesn't know the race of the voter either, and in any case accounts for about one error in 250,000 votes cast. (And, as some have asked, is it not racist in the first place to assume that those who spoil ballots are necessarily minority voters?)

The Commission simply assumed that the invalid ballots were those of minorities. That somehow blacks and other minorities were shut out of voting based on the evidence that 180,000 ballots had no valid vote for president. That somehow those counting the ballots knew the voters were black.

Sounds absurd, but that's the core of the claim.

The question then is: was the commission able to come up with "a consistent, statistically significant relationship between the share of voters who were African-American and the ballot spoilage rate?"

The answer is a flat "no". In fact, a study showed something else entirely:

John Lott, an economist and statistician from the Yale Law School now with the American Enterprise Institute, studied spoilage rates in Florida by county in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections and compared them with demographic changes in county populations. He concluded that "the percent of voters in different race or ethnic categories is never statistically related to ballot spoilage."

Lott found that among the 25 Florida counties with the greatest rate of vote spoilage, 24 had Democratic election officers in charge of counting the votes. He concluded that "having Democratic officials in charge [of county elections] increases ballot spoilage rates significantly, but the effect is stronger when that official is an African-American."

In other words, the possibility of disenfranchisement as charged by the Civil Rights Commission took place in counties with Democratic officials in charge of the elections and counting.

How then is it possible for Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush in particular and the Republicans in general, to have "disenfranchized" minority voters in those counties?

In fact, ballot spoilage at the rate indicated in the 2000 election is about average and happens in every election:

Ballot-spoilage rates across the country range between 2 and 3 percent of total ballots cast. Florida's rate in 2000 was 3 percent. In 1996 it was 2.5 percent.

Another of the charges leveled was that blacks were kept away from the polling places by police.

Other charges from Democratic activists turned out to be "falsehoods and exaggerations." For instance, when the commission investigated the charge that a police traffic checkpoint near a polling place had intimidated black voters, it turned out that the checkpoint operated for ninety minutes at a location two miles from the poll and not even on the same road. And of the sixteen people given citations, twelve were white.

And last, but not least, "the Florida attorney general Bob Butterworth-a Democrat-testified that of the 2,600 complaints he received on Election Day, only three were about racial discrimination."

The myth's foundations are easily destroyed with fact, but not as easily dismissed by those who badly want to believe George Bush was "selected not elected". Although false, the myth gives them a basis for their claim to the illegitimacy of Bush's presidency and a reason for their hate. Whether its true or not apparently doesn't matter anymore (and I'm not so sure it mattered then) as the hate is now so rooted within them that it is a part of their political being. ABB is their mantra and ABB is who they'll vote for, regardless of whether that's good for the country or not.

The excerpts are from James Fund's new book Stealing Elections, via RealClear Politics.

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